‘Legend of the Zelda: Breath of Wild’ Uses the Power of Physics & Chemistry

"Legend of the Zelda: Breath of Wild" technical director Takuhiro Dohta claimed that the Nintendo Switch's game does need a chemistry engine. The game's director discussed some open-world game's design philosophies during Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The technical director Takuhiro Dohta of "The Legend of the Zelda: Breath of the Wild" joined Nintendo way back in 2003 which we contributed a bunch of Zelda games such as "Twilight Princess," "The Wind Walker," "Skyward Sword," and "NintendoLand."

As reported by Thumb Sticks, game developers of "The Legend of the Zelda: Breath of the Wild" discussed that they had to work with the convention breaking along with multiplicative gameplay approach. Starting from the game's terrain system to construct massive world along with its graphics and sounds, especially to its level design methodology, and animation that makes them struggle. To answer their dilemmas in game's development, they overthink and manage asset creations which can be found in the disciplines of chemistry and physics.

They consider "The Legend of the Zelda: Breath of the Wild" to be under the category of action games where they outlined that most of the action games involve movement, collision, and object states which can be termed as Physics in video games. Developers designed the game with a set of rules for the sake of the game's fun and the importance of player's cleverness.

"The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" will feature a wide open world that uses Physics and Chemistry that will make players to test a higher degree of freedom to enjoy experiments. But not just Physics, Chemistry elements were used in the game. Developers decided to create a Chemistry engine, a rule-based state calculator while Physics can be a rule-based movement calculator.

According to Venture Beat, water, fire, and ice were elements in a constant state which engines can't hold but as for solid objects such as rocks, trees, even players, and obstacles are considered to be materials in "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild." Chemistry engine can be applied using these calculations that were based on three simple rules. (1) Elements can change the state of materials, such as leaves on a tree can be burned and will disappear. (2) Elements are able to change each other's states; where fire disappears when it comes into contact with water. (3) Lastly, materials cannot influence each other's states.